Monsterpieces: William Vollmann's Volumes

A Table for Fortune

[When an editor at the New York Times Book Review asked me in mid December of 2025 if I might be interested in reviewing Vollmann’s four-volume novel A Table for Fortune, which the editor described as a “MONSTERpiece,” he didn’t sound very hopeful. He said, “You probably have a life.” I didn’t, so I agreed to a tight reading and writing schedule since the novel was scheduled for March publication. After I turned in my review, and after it was edited, Vollmann’s publisher announced release would be delayed until June. A Table for Fortune is about the failures of and misuses of the CIA over five decades but concentrating on 9/11. In a way, I was happy that I didn’t have months of life to do the review because I might have been tempted to spend the time doing background research on the agency. The book is being published in August, but the Book Review is publishing the review online now in July. The review will appear in the print edition in August. The online version has some links for even further reading!

In his preface to A Table for Fortune, Vollmann says he’s not so much “against” the CIA as the “overreach” of presidents who have ignored or politicized the agency. Between the writing of my review and its publication, Trump started his war against Iran. Early journalistic reports suggest that he discounted briefings by his intelligence agencies and decided to begin the war based on—he has said—his “feeling” an attack by Iran was “imminent.” We may never know what the CIA told Trump about Iran or the truth of why he went to war, but his action, for various reasons much discussed, does seem to be the kind of executive “overreach” Vollmann catalogues in his novelistic history that includes the first Trump administration. Trump is mentioned in the novel and review, but we—the Book Review and I—decided not to insert into the review a paragraph like the one you are reading. While the novel and maybe the review of it are prescient, neither was influenced by 2026 events.

For subscribers to Monsterpieces, here are two teaser paragraphs from my review:

Some of the book’s features resemble those of other hefty and heroically chancy American novels — the documentary experiments of Dos Passos’s “U.S.A.” trilogy, the fragmentary logorrhea of Gaddis’s “JR,” the paranoia in Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow,” the hyper-patriotic voice of Uncle Sam in Coover’s “The Public Burning,” the descriptions of tedious government bureaucracy in Wallace’s “The Pale King.”

If you’ve been defeated by one or more of these books, “be not afeard,” as Caliban says in “The Tempest.” “A Table for Fortune” continually pulls you back in with the gravity and magnetism of Sept. 11. From his early pages detailing the chaos of 2001, Vollmann keeps the attacks in our sights throughout, even as he works back to Vietnam and then through the decades of faulty intelligence and executive malfeasance that caused the catastrophe — and others afterward.

Below the link to my review of A Table for Fortune is another link—to my review of Vollmann’s National Book Award-winning 2005 novel Europe Central, which is partly about intelligence and communications in Eastern Europe during World War II. The protagonist of A Table for Fortune begins his career at the CIA on the East German desk, and the new novel can be thought of as a continuation of Europe Central, a relationship I could have discussed with some of those months and more space.

In the novel and in recent interviews, Vollmann has said he is terminally ill with cancer. I am pleased that the review is being published now. As I say in the review, A Table for Fortune is a worthy pyramid.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/08/books/review/table-for-fortune-william-vollmann.html?searchResultPosition=1

https://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/books/review/europe-central.html